New Librem 13 version to be manufactured & shipped through Spring 2017

True to the promise we have made last month, we are thrilled to announce that today, February 15th, 2017, we are placing orders throughout our supply chain for all components needed for the Librem 13 v2 to begin shipping-from-inventory in April-May onwards! This comes after months of efforts to:

close investment to place a large-enough order that we can have inventory to ship directly from.

This is a critical step. Future Librem 13 orders, from May onwards, will only take days to fulfill. Incrementally throughout 2017, this will become the way we fulfill orders for all our existing products.

A last minute opportunity to hop onto this batch

As we are purchasing supplies to create a large inventory of Librem 13 v2 units, any extra Librem 13 orders placed between today and March 15th will be added on top of this large order and can thus be expected to ship at the same time (estimated time of arrival to you: April-May, 2017). So if any of you were waiting for the opportunity to buy units that would ship quickly to you, now is your best opportunity—and you’ll be supporting us in the process, creating a virtuous circle. Please spread the word to those around you as well!

Will this batch ship with coreboot preinstalled?

Most likely. We will try as much as possible to squeeze this into the manufacturing schedule as we are nearing completion on our coreboot porting and validation for the Librem 13 v1 (more news coming soon), but we’re not making hard guarantees about having it ready just yet. If the timeframe is too tight to preinstall it on units to be shipped in April-May, we will offer to have your order wait until we can pre-install coreboot, or provide you with tools and instructions to install it yourself through a simple software update.

What about the Librem 11 and 15?

Our 13″ laptop being the most popular model, we’re fulfilling orders for this product as the first batch of 2017, simultaneously creating inventory for future Librem 13 orders. For those who have preordered Librem 15 and Librem 11 units, you will have to wait a little bit longer, but not very long: this new Librem 13 batch, and our ability to finally ship the Librem 13 from inventory, will help us gain the financial leverage we need to do the same for the Librem 11 and Librem 15 soon afterwards. We’re hoping to achieve this during the beginning of the summer. We will keep you updated on our progress—for now, we just need to be careful and do things one step at a time.